I had been struggling with making the integration test working with Spring 2.5.6 for last two days. Finally I have manage to make them work and successfully run on JBoss AS 6 and 7 (previous versions like 4.x and 5 will be tested soon - but it quite likely that the will work without any changes in the code). As already mentioned in previous posts the Spring 3.x extension works well with JBoss 6 and 7.

As for the Spring 2.5.6 I found quite weird behavior. I wasn't able to make context: component-scan working it seems that this is more related to the spring version, because the Spring 3 works perfectly well here, but I found here interesting information in the Spring reference:

{quote}

Note that the scanning of classpath packages requires the presence of corresponding directory entries in the classpath. When building jars with Ant, make sure to not activate the files-only switch of the jar task!

{quote}

I was wondering how does the ShrinkWrap archives behave here and is there a way to include in them full directories paths?

I'm excited to read about your progress, Jakub. And thanks Marius for providing some key guidance. It's great to this effort be able to tap into Snowdrop, something that can really bring this extension full circle to offering something *more* for Spring developers.

OT:

I'm going to plant a little gossip that might pique your motivation to keep going strong. I picked up that the Spring camp is working on a DBUnit extension for Spring tests, duplicating in part the work of the Ace on the Arquillian persistence extension. As your extension starts to take shape, we can pair it up with the Arquillian persistence extension and, voila, Spring developers now have the same kick-ass persistence extension as non-Spring developers (the beauty of Arquillian). Winning.

...and, of course, if you need to clear your head and want to mess around w/ the Arquillian persistence extension, you know where it is

first of all I must say you are doing astonishing work for Spring integration. This topic is recurring in almost every talk I'm giving about Arquillian so having Spring support as first class citizen would be definitely a huge advantage for us. And will save me from answering "springy" questions with "we will have it, it's already work in progress"

Since I was called by Dan I just want to add that you can count on me with regards to APE + Spring any time. Just ping me and I'll be summoned.

Speaking about spring-dbunit project, I saw that one already few days back and it's offering all what we (and Unitils) offers. Maybe DataSetLoader (or any kind of data provider in our case) is something we should consider. To give the end user more flexibility in this area. I already have some initial sketches for entity provider similar to the concept of data provider from TestNG. Another thing to look at is configuration stuff - maybe I'm missing something in APE. But to be honest I'm really wondering why they* came up with it if they have Unitils for ages which is designed with Spring in mind.

* I think it's more side project of VMWare / SS employee rather than Spring module or sth like.

1. First would be transaction support, similar to those that Spring Test provides. I think that this would be easy to achive, although the APE API would need to provide some extension points in order to implement e.g. seperate transaction manager, then I could simply prepare a TransactionWrapper that would delegate to Spring Platform AbstractPlatformTransactionManager.

2. For second thing, I do know that there is no similar functionality but I would like introduce support for using data sources configured within Spring. In my opinion that would reduce greatly the needed steps to set up the tests.

That's definitely something worth to implement on the SPI level. I'm anyway starting to work on SPI modules (also for different "data providers" such as Liquibase), so I will aim to expose transaction and datasource handling as well. I will keep you updated. From the timeline perspective however, I don't expect to have it before July. I hope you will still be busy with other things around the core Spring extension